Linda Flower, Professor
of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, is Director of the Center for Study
of Writing and Literacy and of CMU's Center for University Outreach. As a co-founder
of the Community Literacy Center in 1991, she hoped to put her own research in
cognitive rhetoric and problem solving to use in a place where it might make a
real difference. As it turned out, of course, mentoring teenage writers, teaching
CMU's Community Literacy course, and collaborating with the CLC team has given
the research a new focus on how writers struggle and deal with conflicting voices
and goals (The Construction of Negotiated Meaning); on how they learn to
embrace rival perspectives (The Rival Hypothesis Stance and Intercultural Inquiry);
and on how teachers must also enter these contested places and engage in joint
inquiry into the discourse practices of their students ("Negotiating the Meaning
of Difference").
As new director of the Center for University Outreach, she is hoping to integrate opportunies for intercultural inquiry and the practice of Community Problem-Solving Dialogues developed at the CLC into a wider practice of university education at CMU.